The Polo Lounge

Eighty Years of Breakfast, Deals, and Bougainvillea

The Polo Lounge is a restaurant in Beverly Hills serving Classic American with Italian Edge. The Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel has watched all of it from the same pink-striped booths since 1941.

The restaurant opened as a gathering place for the polo-playing set that gave it its name, and the clientele shifted quickly toward Hollywood's working elite. Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, and Fred Astaire were among the regulars who used the patio and bar as an informal extension of the studio lot, a place to be seen doing business, or to be seen not doing business. That culture of strategic visibility never left. It has earned six awards.

The Scene as the Main Course

The restaurant is priced at about $100 per person. The Polo Lounge makes no apology for leaning hard into the second category. The dining room's large glass windows are retractable, opening fully onto a patio bordered by dense greenery and bougainvillea draped across exterior alcoves. The visual effect is a carefully maintained version of Old Hollywood's idea of California outdoor living, and it still works.

Particularly requested seats are Booths 1, 2, and 3, positioned directly in front of the entrance with sightlines to the bar and the arriving crowd. The seating preference is not accidental; the restaurant functions as much as a social stage as a restaurant, and the booth hierarchy is part of the architecture of that stage. The crowd on any given lunch service tends toward entertainment-industry figures, international visitors who have been coming for years, and a contingent of regulars for whom the room is as much habit as destination.

Live music runs through most of the day, a pianist or a singer-guitarist depending on the hour, and Sunday brunch formats around a live jazz trio performing for the duration of service. This kind of sustained programming is more common in hotel dining than in standalone restaurants, and it reinforces the restaurant's identity as a room you occupy rather than pass through quickly.

The Kitchen Under Chef Michael Santoro

Chef Michael Santoro oversees a menu that balances signature dishes with steady execution. Chef Michael Santoro operates within those constraints alongside Ashley James in the kitchen, and the menu reflects a deliberate commitment to continuity over reinvention.

The Dutch apple pancakes, served with sour cream and heirloom apples, and the tortilla soup have appeared on the menu long enough to qualify as signatures rather than simply dishes. The tortilla soup arrives with grilled chicken, queso fresco, green onion, avocado, and crispy tortilla strips; the McCarthy salad, named after a polo-playing patron, layers romaine, chicken, eggs, red beets, tomatoes, cheddar, applewood-smoked bacon, avocado, and balsamic vinaigrette. These dishes have the kind of specificity that comes from repetition over decades, not from a seasonal tasting menu rethought each quarter.

Dinner extends into more conventional steakhouse territory: a 10-ounce prime rib eye with whipped potatoes, roasted mushrooms, grilled balsamic red onions, and bordelaise sauce. The West Hollywood salad, quinoa, farro, kale, spinach, mizuna, garbanzo beans, hearts of palm, golden raisins, toasted sunflower seeds, feta, and preserved-lemon vinaigrette, sits at the other end of the spectrum, addressing the California health-conscious palate that has always coexisted with the steakhouse side of the menu. That balance between old-guard American cooking and lighter California sensibility is one of the defining tensions in Los Angeles dining broadly, visible in different ways at places like Osteria Mozza and Providence.

The Wine Program

Wine Director Csaba Oveges oversees a list of 1,270 selections backed by a 20,000-bottle inventory, a scale that puts it well above most standalone restaurant programs in Los Angeles. The list concentrates strength in California, Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Champagne, a profile that mirrors the tastes of a clientele that has been ordering at this address for decades. Corkage is set at $75. For comparison, the wine programs at ambitious independents like Lazy Bear in San Francisco or The French Laundry in Napa operate at similar inventory depth but with stronger somm-driven curation toward emerging regions. The restaurant list is built for depth in the classic categories, not for discovery.

Afternoon Tea and the Friday-Saturday Calendar

Friday and Saturday afternoon tea services are a distinct part of the weekly schedule. The format sits between the full dining experience and the bar, drawing a different mix than the lunch or dinner crowds and positioning the restaurant within a broader tradition of hotel afternoon tea that is more common in London or Hong Kong, where places like 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana occupy adjacent luxury hotel territory, than in Los Angeles. Sunday brunch leans toward a three-course format with dishes including almond-crusted French toast and corned beef hash, accompanied by the jazz trio throughout service.

Dress Code and Practical Notes

The atmosphere reads formal in its bones, the booths, the piano, the sightlines, but the dress code in practice runs smart-casual for daytime. Seersucker and tennis shoes are acceptable; flip-flops are not. The current latitude on women's dress code traces directly to Marlene Dietrich, who as a Beverly Hills Hotel resident in the 1940s persuaded management to lift the ban on slacks for women, a detail that has become part of the room's documented history.

Planning Your Visit: How the Polo Lounge Compares

The restaurant is open seven days a week, 7 am to 11 pm. It sits at 9641 Sunset Blvd, Beverly Hills.